90% of programmers work on software in-house or for a contract firm that produces specific, custom solutions, not for companies that make retail sales. They will not be affected, and demand for programmers is such that the people who wind up unemployed at small vendors will be able to get jobs doing in-house work.
But, of course, the real reason Microsoft got so strong is that IBM chose them to produce the OS. If IBM had developed this in-house, I don't think we'd have a Microsoft today. IBM would probably still be a juggernaut (if it survived anti-trust lawsuits)
That last bit -- there was a big reason why IBM didn't force MS to sign an exclusive contract. The big multi-decade Justice Department anti-trust suit against IBM.
This is why, despite my libertarian-conservative beliefs, I didn't oppose the MS antitrust suit. MS wouldn't have had an OS market outside of IBM if it weren't for the DoJ.
ICANN/IANA and NSI are incorporated under U.S. law.
Nothing's stopping anyone else, in any nation, from setting up their own alternative root server. However, as long as the only existing, generally accepted root servers are controlled by organizations incorporated in the U.S., U.S. law will be the governing authority for domain names.
Mot is sued because they put the damn things up in the first place
Actually, international treaties are quite clear -- the national government of the site from which the sat was launched into space has full financial responsibility for any damage the sat inflicts. Not Motorola.
Oh, Microsoft did do manipulation -- but not against OS/2 until Warp and Windows 95 came out. And per-processor fees also did some damage.
But OS/2 2.x's problem was really that it cost more for both the hardware and software standpoints than Windows 3.1 in 1992. You could run Windows on an old 286 with a meg of RAM -- something utterly impossible with OS/2.
The people Microsoft really hurt were Digital Research from 1985-1995, and Netscape 1995-today. OS/2, as much as I loved it, didn't stand a chance.
The guys at intel seem to be far more comfortable sticking with what they "know" than moving ahead. This explains why the ISA bus has lasted far longer than it should have
Er, ISA survived because people demand it, not because of Intel conservatism. Intel has tried to kill ISA for five years, much like the consortium of PC makers behind EISA ten years earlier.
ISA survived not because the bus and chip makers liked it, but because nobody wanted to throw away an old but solid peripheral in favor of a new one that did the exact same thing no better; and in low-bandwith situations, that was what was being asked.
Why did Win 3.1 kick everyone's butt despite having a horrible interface compared to the Mac or OS/2? Because it had all the applications that everyone wanted.
Not true. There was very little that Windows 3.1 could run that OS/2 2.0 could not; in exchange, all the OS/2 and Windows 2.x apps could run only on OS/2. OS/2 *beat* Win3.1 in number, variety, and quality of apps.
No, Windows won because it was cheaper in software (OS/2 buyers also had to buy a copy of Win-OS/2) and in hardware (Windows 3.1 handled 4 MB of RAM pretty well, and was good with 8 MB -- less than 12 MB for OS/2 2.0 and you were sucking hind tit).
Steven E. Ehrbar
Re:Is this the right thing to do?
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 2
When a creature falls prey to extinction, be it through natural predation or the stupidity of man
Yes, Earth-origin bacteria spread on dust from asteroid impacts with the Earth are probably out there. There might be some that have found a place that they can survive; at worst, there'd be some still in spore mode. On life of nonterrestial origin in the solar system, I'd say the odds are 9-8 and pick 'em; either surviving Mars organisms from the wet era, or of a form unlike earthly life.
No, even complex organisms simply can be explained. The Bible never says life has been created in the heavens, but the fact that angels are mentioned as existing without any account of their creation means a nonmention of creation does not constitute proof of nonexistence.
No, because abiogenesis may be dependent on factors not yet considered.
Amazing how many people fell for this. Man, you should try alt.religion.kibology for a while.
Other than the blasphemous assumption in the second paragraph, it was pretty good. But, there are Fundamentalist Christians who actually do make those kind of categorical statements about what God would or would not do, without any Scriptural support.
Oh -- one thing. You assumed Europa existed, despite the fact that it's not visible to the naked eye and isn't mentioned in the Bible. A line about how astonomy moved straight from serving Satan through astrology to serving Satan through godless science would have served well.
A handful of real-mode interrupts were still handed off to real-mode DOS as late as Windows 95 at least, but I don't have my copies of Unauthorized Windows 95 or Windows 95 System Programming Secrets anymore. I'm kind of curious to find out how many real-mode calls survived to Windows Me despite the MS hype...
Structurally, Windows took over more and more of the job of DOS, starting with Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode. Win95's internals weren't a heck of a lot different than Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with 32-bit file access activated, although both used DOS for some low-level functions.
Eh, the DOS/Windows history could be a lot more complicated if they started with CP/M, and included the OS/2-Windows-Windows NT back-and-forth...
Steven E. Ehrbar
This Guy Doesn't Know What UNIX is!
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 2
First, UNIX isn't an operating system. Today, UNIX is a branding for a variety of OSes that meet the UNIX specification. And the UNIX 98 workstation specification includes X, CDE, and Motif. So all OSes that meet the UNIX specification simultaneously meet Mr. Every's standards.
But furthermore, MacOS X is NOT UNIX, since it does not include X, CDE, or Motif.
So sorry, David! Thanks for playing the Game of Semantics. Next time check the definitons of your terms before playing!
Actually, a much better analogy would have been the CD players in every '98 Cadillac. They were a standard feature -- you couldn't buy a Cadillac without getting one, and their presence discouraged people from buying a different player from a manufacturer other than Delco (at the time a GM division).
An even better one is OS/2 including Web Explorer even before Windows 95 was first released. (Still has the best damn session history of any browser ever released.)
Now, the obvious conterclaim is that Cadillac didn't have a car monopoly, and neither did OS/2. Furthermore, neither GM nor IBM signed a consent decree to refrain from bundling products...
Well, I'd say you're probably right about commercial Unicies getting folded into Linux. It's simple economics.
Neither SGI nor IBM make money off their Unicies, the make money off the harware the Unicies run on. So why not bootstrap Linux to the point where you can replace Irix and AIX with an OS other people will contribute to maintaining?
DON'T FEEL GUILTY! The eight-hour day was designed for labor with minimal mental effort.
Most people are mentally productive and efficient about two hours a day on a regular basis. The rest of the time at work for a white-collar worker consists of doing their core job at less than full competence, completing the mundania necessary to the job, and slacking.
And of those things, the slacking is the most conducive to keeping you mentally rested enough to be able to have those productive hours each day. Working hard at mental work eight hours a day is a recipie for producing eight hours of low-quality mental work each day.
Now, this is also why enjoying your work is valuable. If you truly enjoy your work, you will get some of the benefits of relaxation from the work itself -- in that case you'll probably have no trouble putting in four hours of work per day and will desire to put in those hours anyway.
Anyway, they're not paying you for eight hours of work; that's just the traditional way of accounting the pay. They're paying you for the two hours of productivity, even if they don't understand it.
First thing that ran through my mind with "LUG" related to the Comic Store Guy was the former holders of the Star Trek RPG license, Last Unicorn Games. Given Comic Store Guy is a Trekkie and an RPG player...
What, you didn't like having all those cousins of Jar-Jar killed in an unnecessary battle?
It amazes me how many people didn't walk away from that movie in awe at Lucas's storytelling skills. That such a dark plot could unfold beneath the veneer of a heroic adventure suitable for kids . . .
Cliff's Notes:
Palpatine and Sidious are the same guy. Palpatine invaded his own world to get himself made leader of the Republic, a position he will leverage into becoming the Emperor. He'd have had to remove the droid armies in order to get a political victory to solidify his election anyway; hundreds of Gungans died in an unecesssary war and only a pair of underlings on Sidious's side were killed. (The fact that the invasion of Naboo was a ploy is why it was a "phantom menace".)
Oh, and Qui Jon's death leads directly to a Jedi starting the training of Darth Maul's replacement; so the Jedi lose a Master and Palpatine merely has to wait to get an apprentice stronger than Maul.
Way back in the 19th Century, New York had very liberal incorporation laws. When New York passed a stricter set of laws, a group of New York lawyers went to Delaware and convince the legislature to pass their own very liberal incorporation laws.
A flood of incorporations then came to Delaware, making it nationally dominant, and thus created a network effect. Most incorporations happened in Delaware, so most legal experts in incorporation were specialized in Delaware incorporation law, so most incorporations were done in Delaware, so...
Since then, Delaware has managed to keep itself a good location for incorporation with low taxes, liberal laws, and expert judges to supplement the network effect.
Look at Office 2001 for the mac, you can see what I mean. Mircosoft knows Mac users dont' like Microsoft. So they are downplaying everything that says Mircosoft. It's totally carbonized, etc.
Rembember what Office for Mac was like between 1995 and Jobs striking the deal with Microsoft? A mere recompile using the weak Mac support in the MFC libraries.
Given that there's nobody in the Linux world with sufficient authority to make that kind of deal with MS that Jobs made, why would MS give us anything better than the Mac had before the deal?
And for all you doubting thomas's. Interenet Exploer 5 for MacOS is the most standards compiant browser on the market. I'd execpt no less form Microsoft on a linux port.
And Internet Explorer 5 for Solaris is as non-standards-compliant as IE 5 for Windows, and is as unstable as a four-legged stool with only two legs left.
I think they're protesting the two halves of the Corporatist party.
Er, the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats are in Europe, not the U.S.
You see, corporatism is a long-established political science term which refers to the kind of government-corporation-union cooperation you see most often in the smaller Germanic states, and to a lesser degree in the rest of Europe and in developed East Asia. Under the established definition, the United States is one of the least corporatist developed nations on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
90% of programmers work on software in-house or for a contract firm that produces specific, custom solutions, not for companies that make retail sales. They will not be affected, and demand for programmers is such that the people who wind up unemployed at small vendors will be able to get jobs doing in-house work.
Steven E. Ehrbar
But, of course, the real reason Microsoft got so strong is that IBM chose them to produce the OS. If IBM had developed this in-house, I don't think we'd have a Microsoft today. IBM would probably still be a juggernaut (if it survived anti-trust lawsuits)
That last bit -- there was a big reason why IBM didn't force MS to sign an exclusive contract. The big multi-decade Justice Department anti-trust suit against IBM.
This is why, despite my libertarian-conservative beliefs, I didn't oppose the MS antitrust suit. MS wouldn't have had an OS market outside of IBM if it weren't for the DoJ.
Steven E. Ehrbar
ICANN/IANA and NSI are incorporated under U.S. law.
Nothing's stopping anyone else, in any nation, from setting up their own alternative root server. However, as long as the only existing, generally accepted root servers are controlled by organizations incorporated in the U.S., U.S. law will be the governing authority for domain names.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Mot is sued because they put the damn things up in the first place
Actually, international treaties are quite clear -- the national government of the site from which the sat was launched into space has full financial responsibility for any damage the sat inflicts. Not Motorola.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Oh, Microsoft did do manipulation -- but not against OS/2 until Warp and Windows 95 came out. And per-processor fees also did some damage.
But OS/2 2.x's problem was really that it cost more for both the hardware and software standpoints than Windows 3.1 in 1992. You could run Windows on an old 286 with a meg of RAM -- something utterly impossible with OS/2.
The people Microsoft really hurt were Digital Research from 1985-1995, and Netscape 1995-today. OS/2, as much as I loved it, didn't stand a chance.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The guys at intel seem to be far more comfortable sticking with what they "know" than moving ahead. This explains why the ISA bus has lasted far longer than it should have
Er, ISA survived because people demand it, not because of Intel conservatism. Intel has tried to kill ISA for five years, much like the consortium of PC makers behind EISA ten years earlier.
ISA survived not because the bus and chip makers liked it, but because nobody wanted to throw away an old but solid peripheral in favor of a new one that did the exact same thing no better; and in low-bandwith situations, that was what was being asked.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Why did Win 3.1 kick everyone's butt despite having a horrible interface compared to the Mac or OS/2? Because it had all the applications that everyone wanted.
Not true. There was very little that Windows 3.1 could run that OS/2 2.0 could not; in exchange, all the OS/2 and Windows 2.x apps could run only on OS/2. OS/2 *beat* Win3.1 in number, variety, and quality of apps.
No, Windows won because it was cheaper in software (OS/2 buyers also had to buy a copy of Win-OS/2) and in hardware (Windows 3.1 handled 4 MB of RAM pretty well, and was good with 8 MB -- less than 12 MB for OS/2 2.0 and you were sucking hind tit).
Steven E. Ehrbar
When a creature falls prey to extinction, be it through natural predation or the stupidity of man
We are natural predation.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yes, no, no.
Yes, Earth-origin bacteria spread on dust from asteroid impacts with the Earth are probably out there. There might be some that have found a place that they can survive; at worst, there'd be some still in spore mode. On life of nonterrestial origin in the solar system, I'd say the odds are 9-8 and pick 'em; either surviving Mars organisms from the wet era, or of a form unlike earthly life.
No, even complex organisms simply can be explained. The Bible never says life has been created in the heavens, but the fact that angels are mentioned as existing without any account of their creation means a nonmention of creation does not constitute proof of nonexistence.
No, because abiogenesis may be dependent on factors not yet considered.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Amazing how many people fell for this. Man, you should try alt.religion.kibology for a while.
Other than the blasphemous assumption in the second paragraph, it was pretty good. But, there are Fundamentalist Christians who actually do make those kind of categorical statements about what God would or would not do, without any Scriptural support.
Oh -- one thing. You assumed Europa existed, despite the fact that it's not visible to the naked eye and isn't mentioned in the Bible. A line about how astonomy moved straight from serving Satan through astrology to serving Satan through godless science would have served well.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Damn I hated that song even when I was a young Silverhawks fan. The idea that metal wasn't real really bugged me.
Steven E. Ehrbar
A handful of real-mode interrupts were still handed off to real-mode DOS as late as Windows 95 at least, but I don't have my copies of Unauthorized Windows 95 or Windows 95 System Programming Secrets anymore. I'm kind of curious to find out how many real-mode calls survived to Windows Me despite the MS hype...
Steven E. Ehrbar
Actually, no.
Structurally, Windows took over more and more of the job of DOS, starting with Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode. Win95's internals weren't a heck of a lot different than Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with 32-bit file access activated, although both used DOS for some low-level functions.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Eh, the DOS/Windows history could be a lot more complicated if they started with CP/M, and included the OS/2-Windows-Windows NT back-and-forth...
Steven E. Ehrbar
First, UNIX isn't an operating system. Today, UNIX is a branding for a variety of OSes that meet the UNIX specification. And the UNIX 98 workstation specification includes X, CDE, and Motif. So all OSes that meet the UNIX specification simultaneously meet Mr. Every's standards.
But furthermore, MacOS X is NOT UNIX, since it does not include X, CDE, or Motif.
So sorry, David! Thanks for playing the Game of Semantics. Next time check the definitons of your terms before playing!
Steven E. Ehrbar
A Mars vehicle would be built for the trip, in Earth orbit
Only if NASA decides to use the $450 billion 1989 SEI plan instead of the more recent $50 billion modified Mars Direct plan.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Actually, a much better analogy would have been the CD players in every '98 Cadillac. They were a standard feature -- you couldn't buy a Cadillac without getting one, and their presence discouraged people from buying a different player from a manufacturer other than Delco (at the time a GM division).
An even better one is OS/2 including Web Explorer even before Windows 95 was first released. (Still has the best damn session history of any browser ever released.)
Now, the obvious conterclaim is that Cadillac didn't have a car monopoly, and neither did OS/2. Furthermore, neither GM nor IBM signed a consent decree to refrain from bundling products...
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, I'd say you're probably right about commercial Unicies getting folded into Linux. It's simple economics.
Neither SGI nor IBM make money off their Unicies, the make money off the harware the Unicies run on. So why not bootstrap Linux to the point where you can replace Irix and AIX with an OS other people will contribute to maintaining?
Steven E. Ehrbar
DON'T FEEL GUILTY! The eight-hour day was designed for labor with minimal mental effort.
Most people are mentally productive and efficient about two hours a day on a regular basis. The rest of the time at work for a white-collar worker consists of doing their core job at less than full competence, completing the mundania necessary to the job, and slacking.
And of those things, the slacking is the most conducive to keeping you mentally rested enough to be able to have those productive hours each day. Working hard at mental work eight hours a day is a recipie for producing eight hours of low-quality mental work each day.
Now, this is also why enjoying your work is valuable. If you truly enjoy your work, you will get some of the benefits of relaxation from the work itself -- in that case you'll probably have no trouble putting in four hours of work per day and will desire to put in those hours anyway.
Anyway, they're not paying you for eight hours of work; that's just the traditional way of accounting the pay. They're paying you for the two hours of productivity, even if they don't understand it.
Steven E. Ehrbar
[shakes head quickly]
First thing that ran through my mind with "LUG" related to the Comic Store Guy was the former holders of the Star Trek RPG license, Last Unicorn Games. Given Comic Store Guy is a Trekkie and an RPG player...
Steven E. Ehrbar
What, you didn't like having all those cousins of Jar-Jar killed in an unnecessary battle?
It amazes me how many people didn't walk away from that movie in awe at Lucas's storytelling skills. That such a dark plot could unfold beneath the veneer of a heroic adventure suitable for kids . . .
Cliff's Notes:
Palpatine and Sidious are the same guy. Palpatine invaded his own world to get himself made leader of the Republic, a position he will leverage into becoming the Emperor. He'd have had to remove the droid armies in order to get a political victory to solidify his election anyway; hundreds of Gungans died in an unecesssary war and only a pair of underlings on Sidious's side were killed. (The fact that the invasion of Naboo was a ploy is why it was a "phantom menace".)
Oh, and Qui Jon's death leads directly to a Jedi starting the training of Darth Maul's replacement; so the Jedi lose a Master and Palpatine merely has to wait to get an apprentice stronger than Maul.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Way back in the 19th Century, New York had very liberal incorporation laws. When New York passed a stricter set of laws, a group of New York lawyers went to Delaware and convince the legislature to pass their own very liberal incorporation laws.
A flood of incorporations then came to Delaware, making it nationally dominant, and thus created a network effect. Most incorporations happened in Delaware, so most legal experts in incorporation were specialized in Delaware incorporation law, so most incorporations were done in Delaware, so...
Since then, Delaware has managed to keep itself a good location for incorporation with low taxes, liberal laws, and expert judges to supplement the network effect.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Look at Office 2001 for the mac, you can see what I mean. Mircosoft knows Mac users dont' like Microsoft. So they are downplaying everything that says Mircosoft. It's totally carbonized, etc.
Rembember what Office for Mac was like between 1995 and Jobs striking the deal with Microsoft? A mere recompile using the weak Mac support in the MFC libraries.
Given that there's nobody in the Linux world with sufficient authority to make that kind of deal with MS that Jobs made, why would MS give us anything better than the Mac had before the deal?
And for all you doubting thomas's. Interenet Exploer 5 for MacOS is the most standards compiant browser on the market. I'd execpt no less form Microsoft on a linux port.
And Internet Explorer 5 for Solaris is as non-standards-compliant as IE 5 for Windows, and is as unstable as a four-legged stool with only two legs left.
Steven E. Ehrbar
I think they're protesting the two halves of the Corporatist party.
Er, the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats are in Europe, not the U.S.
You see, corporatism is a long-established political science term which refers to the kind of government-corporation-union cooperation you see most often in the smaller Germanic states, and to a lesser degree in the rest of Europe and in developed East Asia. Under the established definition, the United States is one of the least corporatist developed nations on Earth.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Pizza probably wouldn't work because the adverts would need to be geographically targetted
Oh, don't worry about that.
First, large chains (Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's) don't need to do much targeting.
Second, Doubleclick can target you geographically -- I recently noticed a banner ad advertising "AAA Michigan". Given that I live in Michigan...
Steven E. Ehrbar